NSO Alexander Anissimov

{TABLE} Aleko Overture ............. Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No 2 ........ Rachmaninov Symphony No 3 .............. Rachmaninov {/TABLE} IT'S been a long wait - since, 1990, in fact - but RTE has finally found the National Symphony Orchestral a principal guest conductor. And all the evidence is that in Alexander Anissimov the orchestra is at last in harness with a man capable of realising the musical potential that has flickered all too rarely into life in the Friday night concerts at the NCH.

Anissimov's work with the NSO (he first met the orchestra through the 1993 Wexford Festival) is rich in the paradoxes that make the art of the conductor fascinating and mysterious. He doesn't speak much English, so his communication - and this is what musicians prefer - is primarily visual.

His effect is both relaxing and potentiating. He makes the orchestral voices speak with generally gentler tone. He doesn't seek attention through insistence or musical arm tugging, yet he's not in the least bit shy of assembling a shattering climax when the music calls for it. In short, he makes the orchestra sound not only radically different, but significantly better.

An all Rachmaninov evening might brand him too much a Russian specialist, and the overture to the early opera Aleko doesn't have a great deal to commend it. But the problematic Third Symphony provided ample opportunity to reveal both an effortlessness of technical resource and a wholeness of musical vision which Dublin audiences have not been accustomed to on a regular basis since the late Bryden Thomson left the RTESO.

Anissimov aims for careful, minutely variegated phrasing, fresh sounding balances of instrumental colour, and pacing which never sacrifices the needs of a movement as a whole to the excitement of momentary thrills.

By these means he held together the potentially sprawling Third Symphony as I have never heard it in concert, and presented it persuasively as the composer's most resourcefully scored orchestral work.

Anissimov was every bit as attentive to detail in his handling of the Second Piano Concerto, and staunchly refrained from letting the tail wag the dog when the soloist, Joaquin Achucarro, tried to run the show while the orchestra had the tune and the piano the accompaniment.

Achucarro is a popular soloist in Dublin, and was enthusiastically received for this performance. But I found his playing too effortful by half, and rarely in full sympathy with the soulful melancholy which lies at the heart of this most popular of concertos.